Within the modern druid tradition we are encouraged to consider those that have gone before us and to draw on their wisdom. But I also enjoy considering and unravelling the ancestory of the land where I am living. When we lived on Eilean Shona the work that had been carried out, particularly during the Vitorian period, was all around us, but we could see signs of human intervention dating back to the days of the last Jacobite uprising and possibly Viking influence. The name Shona seems to have come from Old Norse.

Where I live now the work of human hands is again obvious, from abandoned bridge piers to walls that bisect the landscape and evidence of quarry work on the nearby cliffs. Going back much further there is a scheduled ancient monument out on the hills which is believed to be a bronze age tomb. Not much to see on the ground, just a collection of rocks that is almost impossible to see when the bracken is high unless you know where to look. But in the woods is this wonderful old oak and if you look closely at the photo you can just see where, as it grew, it broke what appears to be the capstone of another tomb. Our local archaeologist has confirmed that it is possibly another site

However to digress a little, once I had finished the renovations on the house I decided to build myself an off-grid retreat hut. Initially I was going to demolish an old weaving shed and build there but then the first Coronavirus lockdown happened and I could not get building materials so everthing stopped. The weather here was surprisingly good for April and I spent long hours on the land. just sitting quietly, I was called by the land to build my hut in a different location and cleared the old growth of rhododendrons that were in the way. This is where my story gets back to Ancestry.

The location was near the top of a cliff that over looks the burn ten metres below and because of this I knew I would need a solid foundation. I set out where I would build four blockwork piers to support the structure.

Hand digging the pits, I hit rock in three of them almost immediately, simply digging out the humus and the rhododendron roots was all I needed to do. The final one, nearest on the left was in fact quite an adventure back in time to the last ice age. The landscape here was below the ice and the flow of the glaciers shaped the land. As the earth warmed and the ice melted ground up rock was laid down as clay and this is what I encountered in this location.

I cleared the humus and immediately hit grey clay, below that was a bright orange clay, once I had dug down a metre there was crumbly rock, clearing that away I finally hit the bedrock. What I had done was to unearth the last 12,000 years of geological history, the ancestry of this land. Once the glacier had retreated the rock was exposed to the extreme cold and the surface was rotted, this was the crumbly rock that I had cleared away. As the ice melted faster It laid down the clay which was iron rich and orange but as this deposition ceased the top layer of clay was again frosted and rotted and turned grey. The humus that I cleared was scarcely twenty centimetres deep and was all that had acumulated in possibly 10,000 years or more. It was quite an unexpected journey back through time and showed me how we limit ourselves if we only think of ancestry as relating to us. So consider your own ancestry and the ancestry of the land on which you live. Even if you are a city dweller the land has a tale to tell, does that influence yours?

So here is my finished hut located above the burn, I named it Fasgadh Beag, Fasgadh is Gaelic for shelter and Beag is small.

Little shelter, seems apt.

Its an important part of my life here and I spend a couple of hours most days in and around it. I’ll write more about this in another blog post.